Job Description

Location:

Condé Nast is a global media company home to iconic brands including Vogue GQ Glamour CN Traveller Vanity Fair Wired The World of Interiors House & Garden and Tatler among many others.

We are headquartered in New York and London and operate in 32 markets worldwide with a footprint of more than 1 billion consumers across print digital video and social platforms.

Condé Nast thrives on collaboration and our teams come together in the office four days a week (Monday - Thursday).

We value diversity of background views and cultures. We celebrate people for their personal qualities skills and contributions recognising the power our brands have to influence and shape culture.

About Condé Nast Technology

Condé Nast Technology builds the products systems and experiences that power our brands from Vogue and The New Yorker to GQ Wired and Vanity Fair. Our mission is to enable creativity and business growth through next-generation publishing loyalty and commerce platforms.

Were a global team of designers engineers product managers and researchers working across London New York and twelve other markets. We believe that a well-formed design culture is essential to delivering excellent products and were actively investing in building one.

About Our Design Team
Our team is experienced in visual design ux design interaction design and design research. We partner closely with editorial product management engineering and business partners to strategise design and launch ambitious digital products. We believe that a well-formed design culture is essential to delivering top-notch work.

The Role:

The New Yorker is one of the most distinctive editorial brands in the world. Bringing that distinctiveness to life online at the quality and precision the brand demands is one of the most interesting design challenges in digital publishing right now.

Were looking for a Product Design Lead who sits at the intersection of system and story: someone who can take what weve built and make it measurably better through focus craft and an instinct for what great actually looks like. This is a senior IC role. Youll work with real autonomy move at pace and make a tangible difference to the experience of millions of readers.

But this isnt just an execution role. Were in a period of deliberate transformation - in how we build how we design and how we use new tools and technology to raise our bar. We need someone who is part of how we move forward: a change agent who brings conviction curiosity and craft in equal measure.

What will you be doing

Elevating visual quality You own the visual standard of the New Yorkers digital experience ensuring every layout interaction and detail feels deliberate considered and unmistakably right for the brand. You bring a sophisticated eye for typography hierarchy rhythm and composition and you know the difference between work that functions well and work that genuinely feels great.

Interrogating the brief not just answering it You ask why this before how. You connect feature work to the wider reader experience identify gaps that others miss and elevate the ambition of the work beyond the initial ask. Youre comfortable pushing back on a brief when the framing isnt right and proposing a better one.

Designing with and within systems You champion design excellence within the parameters of a shared system while knowing exactly where to push beyond it. You balance brand expression with scalability ensuring component use remains consistent and purposeful while creating the moments of distinctiveness that make the New Yorker feel like itself online.

Knowing your reader deeply You dig into data and research to understand what New Yorker readers actually do need and feel not just what they say. You run your own lightweight research and usability testing to pressure-test ideas and prototypes and you partner closely with our UX Research and Analytics specialists to go deeper where it matters. You bring this understanding into every design decision and youre as comfortable in a research debrief as you are in a design review.

Closing the gap between design and delivery You work closely with engineering at the implementation layer not just handing off but staying close to ensure design intent carries through to production. Youre fluent in design tokens comfortable reading a pull request and use Figma and GitHub as tools of genuine collaboration not just artifact management.

Using AI as part of your practice You use AI tools as a working part of how you design for rapid prototyping generative exploration and closing the gap between concept and execution. Youre not waiting to see what best practice looks like; youre helping to define it.

Owning outcomes not just outputs You treat the experiences you design as products not deliverables. You track how your work performs using reader data analytics and qualitative feedback to identify what to improve next. You operate with a strong sense of accountability for the quality of what ships.

Partnering across disciplines You build trusted relationships across design editorial product and engineering. You speak the language of Creative Directors and engineers with equal fluency and you translate editorial and creative ambition into actionable design improvements that actually get built.

Championing design culture You model craft curiosity and clarity through your work. You set the standard for what good looks like mentor through example and help raise the collective bar not just within your team but across the wider design organisation.

Who you are:

You move easily between system and brand thinking understanding how shared components underpin consistency and how to stretch them to deliver distinctive brand expression. You value clarity rhythm and restraint and you know that craft is often what separates good from great.

Youll thrive in this role if

• You have a genuine love for editorial design and storytelling you feel the difference between a reading experience that sings and one that merely works

• You move easily between system and brand thinking knowing where shared components create coherence and where a brands voice warrants something purpose-built

• Youre someone who interrogates briefs questions assumptions and brings a point of view not just someone who executes whats asked

• Youre technically fluent: comfortable in Figma Cursor / Claude and GitHub familiar with design tokens and front-end constraints and able to engage engineers at the implementation level

• Youve already changed how you work because of AI tools and youre curious about what changes next

• Youre outcome-oriented you care about how the work performs not just how it looks in a review

• Youre a strong communicator: direct open and as comfortable receiving feedback as giving it

• Youre a self-starter who doesnt need the path fully defined to move with confidence

What success looks like

In your first six months youll have made a measurable improvement to the quality of The New Yorkers digital experience something tangible that the team and the brand can point to. Youll have built the cross-functional trust needed to keep pushing: with product engineering and editorial. Youll have a clear picture of what the next phase of TNYs product experience should look like and why and youll have started to introduce new ways of working including AI-assisted methods that raise the pace and quality of the teams output.

By the end of your first year that improvement will be visible in the metrics that matter: quality engagement and reader loyalty. Youll have a considered well-grounded point of view on the long-term direction of TNYs digital experience and the relationships to advocate for it. The new ways of working you introduced will be embedded not experiments but how the team operates.

What wed like to see

Were looking for evidence that you can apply design craft judgement and systems thinking to real publishing experiences. Your portfolio should show:

• Editorial and content-led design - examples of designing for storytelling hierarchy and content-rich journeys ideally within digital publishing or media

• Brand sensitivity within systems - how you interpret and express a brand identity within shared frameworks and where youve pushed beyond them

• Motion and interaction - how you design for time: transitions scroll behaviour feedback states and micro-interactions that make reading and navigating feel effortless

• System fluency - how youve refined or extended design systems component libraries or token configurations to elevate quality

• Implementation quality - evidence that your design intent carried through to production; how you worked with engineers or used tools (Figma configs tokens) to protect fidelity

• Visual judgement - confident hierarchy rhythm composition and a clear point of view on what great looks like online

• Curiosity and progression - signs that you stay current experiment with new tools and technologies (including AI) and push your craft forward

Experience: 5 years in product or editorial design roles.

Does this sound like you

Please upload your CV and cover letter/portfolio which highlights why youd love to take on this role and why youre a great match for what were looking for.

We value the time and effort behind every application. All submissions are reviewed by a member of our talent team - we dont use AI-assisted technology to review applications.

What benefits do we offer

• 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) and extra days of annual leave if you move house or want to volunteer.

• Youll have access to a competitive pension scheme Bupa Private Healthcare Season ticket loans and eye tests.

• We offer a range of tools to support your wellbeing including core hours 10 remote days (from home or a country with a Condé Nast office location) access to our Employee Assistance Programme corporate gym membership and cycle to work scheme.

• Were a dog friendly office plus youll enjoy discounts and magazine subscriptions keeping you up to date with all things Condé Nast.

• We encourage personal and professional growth through the Condé Nast Learning Hub where youll find an extensive portfolio of learning courses and training available in local languages.

• Our Employee Resource Groups provide a platform for employees to identify shared objectives exchange ideas and work on community priorities for our global workforce.

What happens next

If you are interested in this opportunity please apply below and we will review your application as soon as possible. You can update your resume or upload a cover letter at any time by accessing your candidate profile.

Condé Nast is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race color religion sex sexual orientation gender identity national origin disability veteran status age familial status and other legally protected characteristics.